Henry Bird Steinhauer (probably also known as Sowengisik, and may originally have been baptized as George Kachenooting), Methodist missionary, school teacher, and translator was born probably circa 1818 in Upper Canada near the present Rama Indian Reserve, eldest son of Bigwind and Mary Kachenooting. He married on August 5, 1846 Mamenawatum (Seeseeb, Jessie Joyful) at Norway House (Manitoba), and they had five daughters and five sons (a great-grandson, Ralph Steinhauer, was lieutenant governor of Alberta from 1974 to 1979). He died on December 29, 1884 at Whitefish Lake, Alberta.

The Ojibwa who became Henry Bird Steinhauer in 1828 was probably originally named Sowengisik. He took the new name after Methodist missionary William Case found an American benefactor who agreed to provide for the education of an Indian youth if that youth adopted his name. It is possible that Steinhauer was also the person baptized as George Kachenooting by Case earlier in 1828, on 17 June, at Holland Landing, Upper Canada. Steinhauer attended the Grape Island school at the south end of Lake Couchiching from 1829 to 1832, and the Cazenovia Seminary in Cazenovia, N.Y., from 1832 to 1835. He was appointed by the Wesleyan Methodist Church to teach at the Credit River mission on Lake Ontario in 1835, and the following year Egerton Ryersonenrolled him at the Upper Canada Academy in Cobourg. His studies at the academy were interrupted for the year 1837–38 by an appointment to teach at the Alderville mission school in Northumberland County, Upper Canada, to which he returned after he graduated in 1839, at the head of his class.

In 1840 Steinhauer was dispatched to Lac La Pluie (Rainy Lake, Ont.) where he assisted the Reverend William Mason as translator, interpreter, and teacher. Two years later, at the request of missionary James Evans, he was sent to Rossville mission near Norway House. Evans felt that Steinhauer would readily master Cree because he spoke Ojibwa, which belongs to the same language group, and would thus be able to assist him in translating the Bible and hymns into his system of Cree syllabics. Steinhauer was the chief translator at Norway House by 1846. In 1851 he was asked to establish a Methodist mission at Oxford House (Manitoba), 200 miles northeast of Norway House, and he built the mission 20 miles from the Hudson’s Bay Company fort. In the fall of 1854 Steinhauer, who was then the only Methodist missionary west of Norway House, accompanied John Ryerson to England to publicize the western missionary work, returning the following spring.

Steinhauer was ordained at the conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada in London, Canada West, in June 1855, and on the 8th of that month received news of his posting to Lac La Biche, Alberta . He was not overly pleased with the posting and thought he might wish to return to the east for his children’s education. He travelled west with Thomas Woolsey, who was posted to Pigeon Lake (Alta). Although they were at the time the only Methodist missionaries in the northwest, they found that they were “surrounded by Romanists” and felt that they were “very closely watched by their two priests.” Lac La Biche was originally selected for Steinhauer “on account of its being out of reach of the enemy, the murderous Blackfoot,” but because he considered the location so removed from HBC posts, he did not encourage the development of a settled mission community there. He preferred instead to travel extensively among the Cree to carry out missionary activities.

The intense rivalry with the Roman Catholic missionaries at Lac La Biche, and the post’s isolation from the fur-bearing animals and the buffalo herds, led Steinhauer, during the early summer of 1858, to move his mission south to Whitefish Lake where there was a band of Cree. The location was ideal, with land suitable for agriculture and a lake abounding with fish. During the winter of 1859–60, when smallpox swept the prairies, Steinhauer temporarily moved the band as a quarantine measure, and no lives were lost. He further ensured the well-being of his mission by discouraging traders from establishing trading-posts in the area in order to reduce the influx of alcohol. In 1864 Steinhauer opened the first Protestant church in the region, at Whitefish Lake. Later that year his eldest daughter, Abigail, was married in the church to John Chantler McDougall, whose father, the Reverend George Millward McDougall, performed the ceremony. With George McDougall and Peter Erasmus, Steinhauer visited the Mountain Stonies that fall in an attempt to expand missionary work among them. Abigail was one of 16 people who died at Whitefish Lake during the smallpox epidemic of 1870. Such epidemics as well as poverty, hunger, and alcohol were continual problems surrounding mission work.

Steinhauer was appointed to Woodville, on Pigeon Lake, southwest of Edmonton, for the 1873–74 season. The Whitefish Lake mission was to be tended in his absence by Benjamin Sinclair, a local leader, but when he returned Steinhauer found it a shambles. Many families had moved away, fields were untended, and church attendance was down.

In an unusually critical letter to the Missionary Society of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada, published in 1875, Steinhauer wrote, “A foreigner either as a missionary or otherwise, will never take so well with the natives of this country . . . there is always a distrust on the part of a native to the foreigner, from the fact that the native has been so long down-trodden by the white man.” He referred to the immigration of whites into the west as a “blighting and benighting” influence and also criticized the missionary society for not heeding his pleas for essential materials. This letter represents a turning-point in Steinhauer’s appraisal of his role as a missionary to the Cree. Although he never ceased to maintain his religious convictions, he did become less of a traditional missionary by, in effect, severing his obligations to the missionary society and asserting his Indian identity.

Shortly after his return from a conference in Brandon, Manitoba, in 1884, an influenza epidemic swept the North-West Territories and Steinhauer fell seriously ill. He died on December 29,.

Reflection

Beautiful is the large church,
With stately arch and steeple;
Neighbourly is the small church,
With groups of friendly people;
Reverent is the old church,
With centuries of grace;
And a wooden church or a stone church,
Can hold an alter place.
And whether it be a rich church
Or a poor church anywhere,
Truly it is a great church
If God is worshiped there.
...author unknown
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"Thus has passed away the old order of things, and in the great march of progress all seems to have changed. In the short period of sixty years the old woods have nearly all been cleared away. The corduroy roads and the stumps are no longer seen. The oxen and the sled are gone. The log barns are rotted away or burned up. The old cradle and the hand rake are seldom used now. The old log schoolhouse on the corner is long a thing of the past. The old church, too, has been changed. Its environment has also changed. In the grassy plot around where it stood are numerous mounds over which the weeds solemnly wave. These were not there sixty years ago. The old shanty with its hallowed associations has passed away. The old clay fireplace, the chain and the hook that hung from the lug-pole, the old bake-kettle that sat on the hearth, the old benches that stood by the walls, all are gone. The old familiar faces that sat around the great old fireplace sixty years ago and told the old stories of their early homes far away, they too are nearly all gone and sleeping - sleeping in the years of the long ago."
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Though everything else has changed the Church remains the same a silent reminder that we need God as much today as our forefathers did a century ago. It stands as a visible link with the past reminding us of the faith, courage and perseverance of the men and women who first settled here.
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’About Music - Tis pleasing to my pensive mind - To recollect the hours - When socially we all combin’d - To exert our vocal powers - Oft we beguil’d the winter eve - Forgot the chilling storm - The charms of music to receive -The sacred notes perform.
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She was so simply beautiful
The village pastor’s child,
It seemed, where’r she turned her face,
Eternal summer smiled.
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"Listening to the song and story of my dusky friends my heart is bounding with delight. . . . Like innocent children they asked me whether or not I had seen any buffalo. . . . The shadows are falling over their pathway. . . . And they bow to the inevitable lot imposed upon them by the white race . . . [they] await the time when the Great Spirit shall call [them] away."